The carabiner had the wrong number.
Mathis saw it before he even read the paper label tied to the wire gate. A broad orange HMS carabiner, the anodizing worn away along the edge, its screw sleeve seized with whitish dust. He had known it for six years. Léon called it “the lock,” because it took two hands to close it in freezing weather. It had never belonged to Noé Perrin.
He set the carabiner on the inventory table’s gray mat.
“That one’s Léon’s.”
Warrant Officer Élise Varin did not look up. She still wore her mountain-rescue beanie despite the room’s twenty-degree warmth. In front of her, three plastic bins held what the helicopter and the ground teams had brought back from the Brèche: metal, fabric, electronics. They had recovered more objects than people, and the disproportion made the room obscene.
“Read the label,” she said.
“I have.”
“Then read it again.”
MATHIS DELMAS / LOT B-17. Below his name, a printed line: *recovered at 2,684 m, right side of debris field*. He made an impatient movement.
“That doesn’t change whose it was.”
Élise finally raised her eyes.
“That’s not what we’re sorting.”
She had spent eight days speaking to him this way, in sentences that offered no purchase. At the hospital, she had asked what he remembered, not what he thought had happened. At the station, she had made him draw the route three times without correcting the discrepancies. Today, she only wanted him to identify his equipment among the things brought out of the snow.
Mathis picked up the carabiner between his thumb and index finger. The sleeve caught halfway. Léon always tapped the carabiner’s gate against his helmet twice after closing it, a superstitious old guide’s tic he vigorously denied. Mathis heard the little *tap-tap* in his head and felt laughter rising, a reflex with nothing to attach to. He swallowed it.
“I saw it on his harness in the parking lot.”
“Maybe.”
“Not maybe.”
“Mathis.”
End of excerpt. Discover the other stories in this universe.